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While may have won all the cool points for sending one of its self-driving cars on a 550 mile trip to Las Vegas for CES, BMW also has a few tricks up its sleeve.

On the top floor of a Las Vegas casino garage, the company demonstrated how a modified version of its BMW i3 electric car can autonomously park itself and then can come pick you up when you're ready to go--BMW calls it the Remote Valet Parking Assistant.

"You can send your car away to look for a parking spot, go shopping and then comes back again when you're finished," said Huber.

In the demonstration, BMW used a Samsung smartwatch to issue the commands to retrieve the car. The app on watch also shows the status of the car.

To get readings of its environment, the car is equipped with four laser scanners on each side of the car. BMW also needs a map of the garage. From there, the car's algorithm can sift through the map and the information coming off the sensors to find a parking spot.

Having to get a map of every single parking garage seems rather impractical for this feature to take off. Werner Huber, head of the research group for driver assistance at BMW, said it can start retrieving the maps straight from garage operators. For the demo, the BMW team created the map of the garage themselves.

also needs a map for its self-driving car.

At the demonstration, BMW also showed off a collision avoidance system using the same four laser scanners. The sensors detect when a collision looks immanent and automatically stops the cars within a few inches of the object.

Google has spurred many automakers to start getting serious about self-driving car technology. But like BMW, many are going slow and testing out self-driving features in tiny iterations.

"We appreciate what Google is doing since they're promoting the idea of the autonomous car and preparing the ground for us," said Huber. "But we are coming at it from another side. As a car manufacturer, we are very experienced in building car and we have to adopt more processes of an IT company."

He shied away from speculating on the idea of partnering with Google for its autonomous driving technology, but admitted it was necessary for a company like BMW to start partnering in this new space.

So how long before we start seeing this in BMW cars? The self-driving technology is still in development at the research stage, but the company thinks it can introduce it into the market in five to eight years, said Huber. One issue is simply the cost of the sensors, which would scare away most consumers. The other is the issue of legality--especially in Germany where there are explicit bans on any kind of autonomous driving. "Often the technology is ready, but the legal framework is unclear," said Huber.